The Benefits of Multi-Cloud Strategies

In this this edition of “Voices of the Industry,” Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer at Digital Realty, outlines the benefits of multi-cloud strategies and how enterprises are realizing the value of embracing a multi-cloud strategy in order to drive a competitive advantage.

Chris Sharp, CTO, Digital Realty

The age of the cloud is upon us, ready or not. Last year we saw cloud strategies truly begin to evolve. In the early days of cloud, enterprises simply migrating some applications to the cloud to lighten the IT load. Today, more organizations are developing individualized multi-cloud strategies to optimize overall network speed and critical-application performance, which generally requires working with multiple cloud service providers.

Enterprises are realizing the value of embracing a multi-cloud strategy in order to drive a competitive advantage. Which is why many have already adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Analysts at 451 Research believed that we breached the cloud adoption midpoint in 2016, with 51% of installed workloads being deployed already residing in cloud data centers.

This has created a major turning point in our industry, requiring us to develop more comprehensive solutions that can help you connect to your critical customers, partners and service providers as easy and seamlessly as possible. To this end, major cloud providers are building tools that expand beyond their own platforms and data center providers are offering interconnection beyond their own walls and campuses.

Today, in order to maximize the potential exposure and use of their product, CSPs are making the offerings compatible with all other major clouds.

Multi-cloud strategies are being driven by both technological and cost-cutting objectives. A multi-cloud environment can give you the ability to shop around for the best price and feature while also providing organizations with potential technological and business advantages.

An effective multi-cloud strategy allows you to spread not only critical workloads, but also risk across multiple cloud environments. When planned through the lens of disaster recovery, this could potentially mean your data would be better protected and recovery efforts a lot less messy and time consuming.  It can also help you identify the right service architecture to optimize location, latency and cost between public and private cloud services.

By enabling both local and remote cloud connections, multi-cloud also allows you access to a wide range of geographical locations, making expanding your global footprint a much less daunting task. Where latency is a potential issue, proximity can become a real advantage, especially when connecting to CSPs within the dame data center campus. At the same time, bypassing the public internet eliminates the issue of speed altogether through direct, secure connections.

Ultimately, your IT department exists to serve as a key business enabler, not to create obstacles. That’s why a multi-cloud solution makes sense as network speed and performance become key differentiators. With the customer demand for tools and services to become ever more cross-compatible and ecosystem friendly, it makes sense that enterprises want to find the right comprehensive solution for their problem.

For organizations today, the cloud question is no longer one of “public or private;” it’s a matter of having the power and flexibility to choose the right cloud at the right time.

Chris Sharp is Chief Technology Officer at Digital Realty. 

Digital Realty’s newest offering, Service Exchange powered by Megaport, enables an organization to develop and deploy a multi-cloud strategy more easily, naturally, and cost effectively than ever before by giving you seamless, on-demand, direct access to multiple clouds from multiple locations through a single interface. Multi-cloud management through a single interface can drive simplicity in managing applications more effectively for your varied lines of business. Click here to watch a brief video and learn more.